Not smoking, drinking moderately, exercising regularly, maintaining a balanced weight and eating healthy are all good habits to adopt on a daily basis for better longevity. According to a recent American study, this could even increase life expectancy by fourteen years.
This is not going to please lovers of excess of all kinds. If we already knew of course that alcohol, cigarettes and lack of physical exercise were bad for health, it has been proven that those who do not smoke, drink moderately, eat healthily and exercise regularly live much longer than the others. Indeed, according to a new American study conducted by Harvard University and published in the medical journal Circulation, these good daily reflexes could increase the life expectancy of… fourteen years.
Sport at least 30 minutes a day
To come to this astonishing conclusion, the researchers analyzed the medical records of 123,000 volunteers over thirty years, also subjecting them to various questions about their daily habits.
They then realized that those who did not smoke, drank moderately (no more than 50ml of wine per day for women, two for men), ate healthily (lots of fruits and vegetables, little red meat and sugar), exercised for at least 30 minutes a day and had a Body Mass Index between 18.5 and 25 lived much longer than others. The difference in life expectancy of up to more than 12 years for men and fourteen for women. What’s more, those who followed these five good habits (only 8% of volunteers) had a 65% and 82% lower risk of dying from cancer and heart disease, respectively. Figures so extreme that the researchers themselves were surprised. “When we started this study, I obviously thought that people who had a healthy lifestyle lived longer, but I was surprised to see how much”, explains Dr. Meir Stamfer, co-author of the study, at the British newspaper The Guardian.
“An alarm bell for the future”
However, these results should be taken with a grain of salt. Indeed, “the participants were mainly white, health professionals”, recalls Doctor Sharon Horesh Bergquis of Emory University interviewed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This limits the possibility of generalizing these results to ethnic and racial groups,” she puts into perspective, stressing that the volunteers themselves filled in the questionnaires on their lifestyle. Despite everything, “this study is a wake-up call for the future well-being of our country,” she admits. “Because despite our advanced medical system, the most determining factor for our health remains our diet and our lifestyle. Not only must each of us take responsibility for our food, but as a society, we must also make healthier overall choices ”.
This study was indeed conducted in the hope of understanding why the United States, which spends more on health than any other country in the world, was not better in terms of longevity. According to the World Health Organization, in 2015, life expectancy at birth was 76.9 years for men and 81.6 years for women. Fortunately, in mainland France, the figures are higher: 79.5 years for men and 85.4 years for women, according to the latest INSEE results. However, the Hexagon also has something to pay attention to: because if our obesity rate today seems very low compared to that of the United States (15% of French adults concerned against 39.6% in the United States), the trend is expected to worsen significantly within the next ten years. It would also seem wise here to take the lifestyle recommendations of this new study seriously.
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